Soundtracker

Year
2010

Runtime
90 mins

Language
English

Alberta Premiere

PG - Advisory: Language May Offend

Gordon Hempton asserts early in Nicholas Sherman’s film that there are very few quiet places left in the United States. That notion has led him on a 30-year mission to record those “quiet places” before they are gone—collecting sounds that, thanks to the march of progress, will become extinct. Hempton savours sound the same way some savour a first kiss—that fated hope to have a moment live forever in time—but thanks to Gordon’s binaural recordings, his sounds will long outlast the dark recesses of nostalgia. SOUNDTRACKER is both a portrait of an uncompromising technician with a very unique obsession and an examination of the march of progress—humankind’s impact on its surroundings—from a very different perspective.